Higgsfield, an AI video startup built for social media creators and marketers, has raised $400 million in a round that values the company at $5.4 billion. The funding is directed at products that help everyday people create high-quality advertisements and short-form videos without the need for a film crew.

Reports suggest that some of the investors include Goldman Sachs and Intel — a sign of how important it has become for major corporations to back video-making programs capable of creating content for TikTok, Reels, and paid advertising campaigns.

Why the marketing and creator crowd should care

The round is more than another big venture cheque. It is a bet on where advertising content is increasingly being made — and by whom. Higgsfield says it already has 25 million users, who have generated more than 850 million pieces of content and now produce around 2 million videos a day. Much of that activity is happening in the very areas the company plans to target with its new capital: social media content, product advertising, and agency work.

Economics will probably be the first thing to grab marketers’ attention. In a January interview with the research company Sacra, Higgsfield founder and CEO Alex Mashrabov said the production cost of broadcast-quality video today runs at about $500 per minute, compared with $100,000 in the past — a decrease of roughly 200 times. Once a 30-second commercial no longer requires filming, a crew, and post-production studios, the economics of brands’ social budgets can change very quickly.

What Higgsfield tells its biggest spenders

Mashrabov was transparent about the speed at which that change is taking place among Higgsfield’s largest clients. “We’re seeing customers with marketing budgets over $100 million who turn 90% of their ad creative — their social media ad creative — to be generated with AI,” he told Sacra.

The customer expansion behind the funding is equally striking. As indicated by Sacra, Higgsfield reached an annual recurring revenue of $100 million by the end of November 2025, a dramatic increase from $11 million just six months earlier. Mashrabov, who previously worked on video and AR effects at Snap, also noted that the company is introducing new features six days a week.

Built to make first-timers look professional

The core idea behind Higgsfield’s pitch to novice creators is very simple: eliminate the technical skills that were once necessary for turning an idea into a finished video. According to the company, even someone who has never made a video before can create one in minutes, thanks to a combination of automatic camera logic and pacing that makes manual editing unnecessary.

Users who want a hands-off experience can rely on that automated pipeline, while those who prefer to be more involved can move into the Cinema Studio workspace. There they have access to 1,296 camera lenses, cinematic color grading, and a range of other proprietary technologies and tools for creating images, character consistency, and storyboards.

The firm is also focused on turning creators into clients and earners. According to the company, the Higgsfield Earn program has employed more than 10,000 creators and has paid out over $1 million. Higgsfield seeks to connect work created on the platform with contracts involving Fortune 500 agencies, NBA teams, and clothing brands. It is a potential cycle that could prove fruitful: first hand new users an arsenal of advanced tools, then show them how to monetize the results of their work.

A crowded, well-funded field

Higgsfield is entering a market that is already attracting serious money. In February, TechCrunch reported that rival Runway raised $315 million at a $5.3 billion valuation, putting the two companies at nearly the same level. Earlier, The Information reported that Higgsfield was in talks to roughly quadruple a valuation that the company had said was above $1.3 billion.

The field extends well beyond venture-backed video startups: OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo have carried text-to-video generation into the mainstream, and tools such as Pika and Luma’s Dream Machine compete for many of the same creators and agencies. Against that competition, Higgsfield’s pitch centers on the surrounding workflow — the automated pipeline, the Cinema Studio toolset, and the Earn program that connects users with paid work.

The larger creator economy is still working through how far it wants to embrace AI-generated content. According to a Digiday report in May, generative AI has entered multiple creator workflows, with a recent survey finding that 80% of creators use the technology. At the same time, YouTube moved against low-quality “slop” content by deleting 16 of its 100 most-subscribed slop channels. For brands scaling AI-made ads, disclosure is part of the operating environment as well: YouTube requires creators to flag realistic synthetic media, and TikTok requires realistic AI-generated content to be labeled — requirements that apply to brand accounts as well as individual creators.

Higgsfield is confident that the need for quick, cheap, and good-quality video content will overcome the doubts. If that turns out to be correct, AI might not only change the way advertisements are produced; it could also influence who the producers are. The concrete markers of that shift, if it comes, are already possible to track: how the new capital is deployed across social, product, and agency tools, whether the large-budget adoption Mashrabov describes broadens further, and how platforms enforce their AI-labeling rules as machine-made creative scales.